Baidu Japan: Coming January 23rd

Motoko Hunt over at Multilingual Search writes about Baidu, China’s leading search portal, and its official entry into Japan

As I mentioned in last month, Baidu has long had its sights set on entering the Japanese market. The launch date is January 23rd (though the site is now live at www.baidu.jp). It appears that additional search features will be launched on the 23rd, such as for travel and restaurants.

According to Motoko, the quality of Baidu’s engine will be rough initially, because some Japanese sites have been avoiding Baidu’s spiders.

And then there’s the issue of content filtering/censorship. It’s one thing for a US-based search engine to be fully open in the US and censored in China (i.e., Google) and another thing for a Chinese-based search engine to be censored at home and fully open abroad. I’m not quite sure this is even possible, but we shall see.